Amit Chaudhuri on great essay collections

Amit Chaudhuri recommends five great collections of essays, from Orwell to
Geoff Dyer

Amit ChaudhuriPhoto: Geoff Pugh

By Amit Chaudhuri

12:00PM BST 12 Apr 2013

The essay is a particularly alluring form for those who are tired of the novel, with its duties towards narrative and mimicking, laboriously, the passage of time, and the compulsion it feels to introduce us to characters.

One thing that the essay does share, though, with the novel is the urge to bring into the domain of the written word what is ordinarily considered unfit for “serious” literature. This is true of the greatest essayists, and certainly of George Orwell, whose Selected Essays (1957) includes his essay on the prurient postcards of Forties England, “The Art of Donald McGill”, as well as “The Decline of the English Murder” and “In Defence of English Cooking”.

Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) is similarly driven by a curious excitement at the idea of writing about detergents, wrestling as a sport, and Hollywood movies about Ancient Rome.

There’s magic when a great writer and a minor theme come together. Geoff Dyer, in Anglo-English Attitudes (1999), is a connoisseur of this peculiar convergence, besides being an acute critic. The critical essay can do what the academic piece cannot – bring us the personality of an intellect – and there’s no better example of this than Tom Paulin’s Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992).

The essay, in the hands of a craftsman, can accommodate both lyrical nuance and dispassionate literary acuity, as in the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s recent Partial Recall (2012).